ARCHIVE

Long Walk (Audio)

May 29, 2020
Created by Claudia Wegener (2009). Introduced by Karen Werner.

Claudia Wegener produced the radio drama Long Walk for German Radio’s Studio for Acoustic Arts in 2009. Long Walk is a compilation made from three connected radio works: the first is called Long Walk and features a public chess tournament occurring across a fence that divided an art gallery from an inner city park in Johannesburg, South Africa. The second section is called Long Walk (abridged) and is based on recordings Claudia Wegener did in various townships around Johannesburg, asking people on the street to do translations of Nelson Mandela's biography, Long Walk to Freedom. The third part of the piece is called Radio Armed Response and is based on recordings from gated communities and interviews with people about their security systems in a suburb of Johannesburg and in Soweto, South Africa.

An important part of Claudia Wegener’s work as a radio artist is a platform she founded in 2005 called radio continental drift, which is worth checking out. radio continental drift is an ongoing radio and audio archive about storytelling and listening across borders. Projects “aim to pass the skills of digital productions and the tools of their distribution into the hands of the storytellers themselves to make way for African producers to increase the online representation of arts and culture from the continent.” Some of radio continental drift’s recent work has been based at a community radio station in Zambia. - Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner.